Making Space in the Works of James Joyce

Valerie Benejam, John Bishop

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136699580
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism History & Theory
• Index: Literature

James Joyce's preoccupation with space—be it urban, geographic, stellar, geometrical or optical—is a central and idiosyncratic feature of his work. In Making Space in the Works of James Joyce, some of the most esteemed scholars in Joyce studies have come together to evaluate the perception and mental construction of space, as it is evoked through Joyce's writing. The aim is to bring together several recent trends of literary research and criticism to bear on the notion of space in its most concrete sense. The essays move dialectically out of an immediate focus on the phenomenological and intra-psychic, into broader and wider meditations on the social, urban and collective. As Joyce's formal experiments appear the response to the difficulty of enunciating truly the experience of lived space, this eventually leads us to textual and linguistic space. The final contribution evokes the space with which Joyce worked daily, that of his manuscripts—or what he called "paperspace." With essays addressing all of Joyce's major works, this volume is a critical contribution to our understanding of modernism, as well as of the relationship between space, language, and literature.

1

Space in Finnegans Wake

An Archaeology

John Bishop

In one of many passages in Joyce’s work explicitly given over to the thematic exploration of “the space question” (FW 160.36)—the fable of the Mookse and the Gripes in Finnegans Wake—the figure of “the Gripes,” or sour grapes, hanging “bolt downright” from a vine-branch and refusing to submit to the Mookse by falling into its gaping mouth (FW 153.10–11), has this to say about his spatial existence: “I connow make my submission, I cannos give you up, the Gripes whimpered … My tumble, loudy bullocker, is my own. My velicity is too fit in one stockend. And my spetial inexshellsis the belowing things ab ove” (FW 154.31–35). The lines are in part saying simply that the Gripes will not submit to the Mookse—as Ireland and Connaught were forced to submit to England under the terms of the papal bull Laudabiliter (“connow,” “loudy bullocker”), and as the Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV was forced to submit to Pope Gregory VI at Canossa (“cannos”). Although he has the capacity to “tumble” from “his temple,” and his potential “velocity is two feet in one second,” the Gripes will not fall, but will rather maintain his place, immobilized as if in a pillory (“my felicity is to fit in one stock-end”), dangling up there in his “special, spatial heaven” (“inexshellsis” suggests the Latin in excelsis, “in the highest”), reflecting from above (“ab ove”), as in the Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus, the “things below.”¹

Two Wakean coinages in this passage—both in the phrase “spetial inexshellsis”—are now going to serve as the springboard of this essay. The first of these terms suggesting infinite extension (“spatial in excelsis”), and the second suggesting containment and enclosure (“in a shell”), they hold out two complementary conceptions of space that this essay will find at work in Joyce. “Spetial” first: historical linguists trace the word “space” back through the medieval Latin spacium to the Latin spatium, relating it in turn to the verb exspatior (or expatior), meaning “to spread out, extend,” “to wander from the course,” “to expatiate or digress,” as in this passage from the Wake, evoking the re-aggregation of space, toward morning, in the rising consciousness of the dreamer:

What was thaas? Fog was whaas? Too mult sleepth. Let sleepth. But really now whenabouts? Expatiate then how much times we live in. Yes? (FW 555.1–4)

Apart from implying the inextricable interdependence of space and time as categories (“whenabouts,” “how much times”), the passage suggests that space is “expatiative” and “expatiatory”: it spreads out from wherever it starts and keeps on unfolding; there is no apparent end to it.² That historical linguists have not traced the Latin words spatium and exspatior back from Latin through prior forms suggests that the terms are relatively modern precipitates of the language; but it is nonetheless tempting to connect them, in the spirit of Joycean “adamelegy” (77.26), to the cluster of words and concepts that spill out of the Indo-European root pet-, which also carries the general sense of “spreading out” and yields such English outgrowths as “paten” and “pan” (things “spread out”), “patent” (“in the open”), “fathom,” “pace,” “pass,” “expand,” “fathom,” and, finally, “petal”—the last of many terms designating items that spread and open outward into space. Space, in this conception, is not something completely and intuitively always already there, but something expatiative, expansive, and exfoliating: both culturally and ontogenetically, it seems to open out and unpetal over time.³

Something of this evolutionary sense of space informs most of Joyce’s fiction. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man begins in the confines of bedroom and family parlor, wanders out across the hall and then outward toward Clongowes Wood, and then continues unfolding, in a series of nesting containments, into an infinitely extensive universe:

Stephen Dedalus
Class of Elements
Clongowes Wood College
Sallins
County Kildare
Ireland
Europe
The World
The Universe (P 15)

The continually amplifying opening of space described in this passage is reflected throughout the novel in the recurrent quasi-Rosicrucian image of Stephen’s life-world as a perpetually unfolding rose (P 172, 218), and is also perhaps carried forth into Ulysses, which begins in comparably confined circumstances (“the omphalos”) and gradually opens outward—unpetals and blooms—into a vision, in “Ithaca,” of stars and galaxies and infinite space. The image of the unpetaling and opening flower, finally, is most fully developed in Finnegans Wake, whose second half, tracing out the slow “opening of the mind to light” (FW 258.31–32), begins with the evocation of a heliotrope turning toward the sun and opening, and recurrently evokes the unpetaling of flowers to suggest the opening of the dreamer’s consciousness to light and the plenum of the world: “Now day, slow day, from delicate to divine, divases. Padma, brighter and sweetster, this flower that bells, it is our hour of risings … Lotus spray. Till herenext. Adya” (FW 598.11–14; see also, for example, 470.13–21, 601.0–20, 602.1–5, 609.11–12, 609.30–32, 613.17–26, 617). Since this passage takes place toward the end of the Wake, as morning dawns in the east, it draws on Eastern languages (“divas” means “day in Sanskrit, “padma” means “lotus,” and “adya” means “today” or “now”)—in part to evoke a Hindu cosmogonic myth, according to which the world and all its appearances unfold from the interior of a lotus blossom implanted in Vishnu’s navel; the opening of this lotus signifies, according to Madame Blavatsky in Isis Unveiled, “the emanation of the objective from the concealed.”⁴ The conception of space immanent in this image and in our speculative etymological treatment of the word—as something that continually and dynamically opens and extends outward, like the interior of an unfurling flower—is one that recurs in Joyce’s writing and whose progressive expansion we will now explore.

Where does this unfurling begin? At the core of the flower, no doubt— within the hermetically wrapped enclosure out of which the flower expands (“inexshellsis”). It can only be out of this darkly enshelled ball that the expatiative process of unpetaling and unfolding can happen; or, as Joyce puts it in a description of a flower, a “chlorid cup” (FW 613.26), opening up to light and the world at the end of the Wake, “a spathe of calyptrous glume involucrimines the perinanthean Amenta” (FW 613.17–18). “[A] space of hidden gloom,” in other words (“calyptrous” suggests the Greek kalyptra, “veil,” and kalypto, “to cover, conceal”), is enveloped (Latin involucrum) by the enclosing “spathe,” “calyptra,” “glume,” “involucre,” or “perianth” designated here (these are all botanical terms for the enwrapping sheaths and husks of flowers and plants); but now the occulted core is opening to light (“Amenta” names the Egyptian world of the dead and perhaps also “amentality” or unconsciousness). Beginning with a consideration of this dark core, accordingly, the remainder of this chapter will go on to explore the process of its opening and exfoliation, in the hope of providing a brief overview of “the ouragan of spaces” (FW 504.14 [“spaces” as well as the “species”]) and an account of the ways in which space is represented as opening out into the world in Joyce—“erigenating from next to nothing and [then] celescalating the himals and all, hierarchitectitiptitoploftical” (FW 4.36–5.2) implies constructedness. The world’s space “erigenat[es] from next to nothing” in this construction—as in the image of the “notyet” existent space locked within the flower—because at the beginning of time, and in the middle of the night, in absolute unconsciousness, space is not there: parts of the Wake, because it is about the night and unconsciousness, take place in what Joyce calls “the no placelike no timelike absolent” (FW 609.2)—in an “absolute absence” void of evident place and time: “Eins within a space and a wearywide space it wast ere wohned” (German wohnet, “dwelled”)—nothing, no place, since “ere wohned” also yields “erewhon,” “nowhere” spelled backward (FW 152.18; more on this citation next).

Yet since one form of unconsciousness (the nothingness of dreamless sleep) recalls another (infantile unconsciousness)—“no thing making newthing wealthshowever” in the Wake’s topologies (FW 253.8–9)—this “nowhere” becomes something of a “newwhere,” opening into the ur-spatialities out of which “Haroun Childeric Eggeberth” (FW 4.32 [egg, birth, child]) and a lot of little Finnegans wake and enter the world. In the Freudian account, as at the end of “Ithaca,” sleep entails “intrauterine regression” and so resituates “the manchild in the womb” (U 17.2317–18):⁵ since in sleep the senses withdraw from the object world and collapse into the interior of a body rocked by circulating waters, its quasi-amniotic spatiality becomes also the spatiality of sleep: “the sleeper turns into himself and falls back into the womb, his own body being the material substratum of the dream-world.”⁶ Joyce accordingly pulls this space to the fore in Finnegans Wake—and especially in “Anna Livia Plurabelle” (Chapter I.viii, 196–216).⁷

We enter life and space “formelly confounded with amother” (FW 125.11–12)—as a body “formerly confounded with another,” that is, because “formally co-founded with a mother.” Our first emplacement in the world and space is as a dual unity situated within a body undergoing formation within the body of a mother. Students and thinkers from a range of disciplines and pop-cultural movements—embryology, prenatal psychology, neuropsychology, and even dianetics—have speculated in various ways about the formative persistence into the present of forms of intrauterine experience and memory: as Samuel Beckett put it in the essay on Joyce that he contributed to Our Exagmination, at least, “there is a great deal of the unborn infant in the lifeless octogenarian” who sleeps, dead to the world, at Finnegans Wake.⁸ Proprioceptive spatial sense of some biologically wired-in sort must begin in the womb—where, for instance, in the “suctorial reflex,” the late-term fetus “learns” to bring its thumb to its mouth and to suck. Freud ultimately regarded memories of life in the womb as fantasies—projections backward in time of idyllic memories experienced at the breast (“the Nirvana experience”)—though this did not evidently stop Joyce, the “biologist in words” who had already tried to represent the life of the embryo in “Oxen of the Sun” and who went about his imaginative reconstruction of the night playfully, from depicting the Wake’s hero, “Haroun Childeric Eggeberth,” as a being returned to the womb and awaiting, with birth and awakening, the cosmogenesis of space and the world:⁹

Before he fell hill he filled heaven: a stream, alplapping streamlet, coyly coiled um, cool of her curls: We were but thermites then, wee, wee. Our antheap we sensed as a Hill of Allen, the Barrow for an People, one Jotnursfjaell … (FW 57.10–14)

Before falling into the gravity-bound travail of life (“before he fell hill”), this being filled a heaven suffused by circulating feminine waters (“heaven: a stream, alplapping”); though really the size of an “antheap,” it seemed a “giant’s mountain” (Danish Jotnursfjaell”), a huge “Hill of Allen” (headquarters of Finn McCool). And though the “he” depicted here is but the size of a “termite”—very “wee”—he’s charged with the potential of explosive growth (“thermite” is an explosive): “(gracious helpings, at this rate of growing our cotted child of yestereve will soon fill space and burst in systems, so speeds the instant!)” (FW 429.11–13). Finnegans Wake begins and ends with evocations of the “alplapping streamlet” and amniotic spatiality treated in these passages—starting with the “riverrun,” “swerve of shore,” and “bend of bay” of its opening paragraph and ending with the flow of the river Liffey (Irish Life) in its last. This quasi-amniotic spatiality is the matrix out of which more evolved forms of space unfold in Finnegans Wake, and, references to ALP being ubiquitous, it forms a kind of background to everything else in the book.¹⁰ In one line of speculation, we never fully leave this space, even in conscious waking life since water “constitut[es] 90% of the human body” and circulates within it continually (U 17.226–227), and since everything that we ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Making Space
• 1 Space in Finnegans Wake: An Archaeology
• 2 Optical Space in Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
• 3 The Acoustic Space of Ulysses
• 4 Text and the City: Joyce, Dublin, and Colonial Modernity
• 5 Gabriel’s Remapping of Dublin: The Fabricated Cityscape of “The Dead”
• 6 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Urban Planner: Plumbing Consciousness in Joyce’s Dublin
• 7 Disorienting Dublin
• 8 The Habitus of Language(s) in Finnegans Wake
• 9 Joyce the Post
• 10 Mapping the ‘Call from Afar’: The Echo of Leitmotifs in James Joyce’s Literary Landscape
• 11 The Thomistic Representation of Dublin in Ulysses
• 12 Writing Space
• Contributors
• Bibliography
• Index